This shot at the Ivo Rowe Pool in South Coogee in Sydney is actually very close to the main reason behind purchasing a 10 stop filter. I love the smooth water effect and the silky sky with clouds.. a good friend and inspirational photographer Alex Wise has captured some marvelous moments with his. The basic crux behind using a 10 stop filter is that it is so black that you must expose for a significant amount of time to allow light to hit the camera sensor. Hence you generally have to expose so long that you create the misty water/streaky sky effect you can see above. I have found a lot of great examples of this over time and as this project continues I hope to bring many more to the screen. My downfall is actually that I love colour (and I find these suit B&W) and that if the weather isnt great I generally wont head out.. but it is usually the best time to go and capture shots like these.

This shot eventuated from a morning that had a rather bland sky.. and some colour cast caused by the B+W filter. I dont mind it though, the highlight isnt too in your face to distract you from the entry points of the railing.. I just love the shadows of the poles as they enter the water and are reflected. I remember it was quite a high tide this morning and it really assisted in the effect. At 301 seconds I hadnt ventured into too many very long exposures until this point.. 5minutes now seems almost the minimum I will go. This project is a lot of fun, but has taken a back seat over the last few weeks. As it’s not defined by strict length of time I am aiming for 52 shots per year and perhaps taking shots over a couple of years to fill out the project.

I am in the process of writing more blog posts and scheduling them for the next week or two. I seem to apologise often for the gaps between blog posts.. I am putting it down to my enjoyment of blogging a whole morning in one go, but I am moving to editing shots on a single basis and quite slowly. I think ill now just blog my new shots as I process them and perhaps discuss a little more about the process involved.

Week 7 – Australia Day Sunrise saw an epic mission unfold! As touched upon in Week 6.. the Australia Day long weekend for 2011 turned out to be epic! Basically a 5 day weekend was formed and myself and a few friends used this to our advantage. We decided to head down south for the first time.. to a little place called Coalcliff which is just south of the Royal National Park. There has been much said about this location for seascapes and sunrises and with Dan suggesting an all night journey.. how could we resist?

Week 6 takes us back to Australia Day 2011.. a long weekend which saw me heading out for 2 sunrises, one which included an all night trip down the south coast (not such a great idea.. I recommend sleeping in the car!)

This was one of the most successful sunrises for me yet.. and it came about from sitting on a rock perch above the platform I was resting the camera on. It is a bit wild the old Whale Beach with the headlands not really protecting the rock platforms next to the beach due to the way they have been formed. So I sat on a higher rock with my tripod fully extended on the rock below.. I would then shoot with my cable release and yank the tripod up by the neck if the larger sets rolled through. By the end of sunrise I was drained.. just from the focus and ongoing concentration on not only what the camera is doing but what the ocean is doing around it.

Makes it sound complicated eh? And some people think all you need to do is press a button! I have been doing lots of shooting lately, but less processing… I seem to be moving towards less is more approach and I might need to restructure my blog posts to include less images (i.e post images up as I complete them rather than wait for me to finish processing sunrises). At the moment I have around 5 sunrises which are incomplete, some which I havent uploaded any photos from at all.. it doesnt bother me too much but I am finding I will edit a shot from one sunrise and move to the next.. to keep it fresh. I think this requires some further thought.

Week 5 – The Ten Stop Pool visits one of my favourite photography spot’s in Sydney, the Mahon Pool in Maroubra. This great location has so many different faces depending on the day and the weather.. and lots of different features and spots near by.. I havent gotten near to seeing it’s full potential yet but I look forward to sharing more. This morning was a bit difficult as it was a fairly large swell and it comes in over the pool. You can see the swirl on the water where it has been disturbed over the 3 minutes. Not long after I moved back to higher ground a bit set came through and would have easily gotten me a bit more wet than I was when I started. All part of the fun.

Week 4 – Ten Boat Ramp Stops. This is a shot of just over 5minutes.. at sunset at the same location as Week 2 in Port Botany. This is a pretty busy hub of boats that come and go.. I had a variety of shots from that evening and this turned out the best. I would have preferred perhaps more cloud streaking and a little less harshness in the light.. but we take what we can get

Week 3 – Ten Stop Coathanger. A Sydney icon was my target on this specific week.. I organised a get together with some fellow photographers as I had this in mind. We then headed out for some fantastic Japanese afterwards.. A great way to spend a weekend in summer in Sydney. Unfortunately for me there wasnt really the right cloud that I was hoping for, but I did pickup this lovely glow on the bridge from the setting sun. I would love to head back and capture something similar.. infact this might be my task for one of my exposures over the next couple of weeks.

I dont normally do this.. but have been working on my post processing techniques this past couple of weeks in an attempt to get ‘more’ out of my images.. and simply love this one I finished last night. I always try and bring the natural look to my images I process, as I like to share what I see. Unfortunately there are some other factors that get in the way of this such as filters (colour cast), exposure differences (sky is brighter than the earth!) and white balance (but wait, its not that colour?!).

This shot is a blend of a slightly underexposed sky (to get the colour) and an overexposed foreground (to get the lightness and the detail). I have also done some selective highlighting to bring out the shapes and sharpening to crisp up areas in the image. I was able to overcome the colour changes with some curve adjustments to the sky and there is very little extra colour added.

So I hope you like, I hope it doesnt take me another 4 weeks to finishing editing the other shots from Avalon. I am thinking I might get some prints made up of this shot, and some others from the morning. If you are interested please email me at info@outsideinpixels.com or contact me through the contact page.

A big thank you my friend Alex Wise for his help with my processing and also to Toan for putting up with my rambling questions and giving me honest feedback.

Week 2 – Port Botany Ten Stops. This was just at the new boat ramp they have built next to the 3rd runway in Sydney. There have been massive developments in the area with the expansion of Port Botany. It is very impressive and I would in fact love to time lapse the area one day. This feels like an eternity ago now.. I think I can improve on this location however

OK! So I started this project at the beginning of the year.. I have completed 24 weeks of it thus far.. though have a couple to put up still. It is an open ended project, with the idea that ill get out there and do a long exposure each week! So I was sort of putting this into other blog posts I was doing but that seems a bit daft.. I should just do it the same as Stormy Stormtrooper. I think ill put the first 20 weeks up every few days and then slot them into updates every Sunday night.

So this is Week 1 .. at the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. f8 @ 61 seconds